Agency in African History is the first edited volume of African history to offer sustained engagement with the idea of agency. Agency is ubiquitous and invisible, contested and yet foundational to the field. These contradictory qualities contribute to the polarization of the term and a stalemate in debates surrounding its use. This volume proposes a way forward by breaking agency down into parts, disaggregating the terms and concepts often associated with agency, and reckoning with historians’ uses and misuses of the term. The book explores how agency has shaped the field of African history and the historical discipline more broadly. Tracing the concept back to the contributions of Black abolitionists and intellectuals in the eighteenth century, the volume challenges popular genealogies of agency in Western academe. Simultaneously, it suggests productive future possibilities for the framework.

The volume contributes to lively debates on the concept of agency in adjoining fields. Recent works in cultural theory, including Naminata Diabate’s Naked Agency (Duke University Press, 2020) and Olúf?´mi Táíwò’s Against Decolonisation (Hurst, 2022), have reinvigorated discussions within African studies about the applicability of agency. In the broader historical discipline, special issues of the Journal of Social History and the American Historical Review (both 2023) have centered on the problems and promises of agency as a historiographical framework, mostly from a Euro-American perspective. This volume makes an urgent intervention in these important conversations, arguing that historians of Africa must both adapt to new scholarly insights and contribute their unique perspectives from a field typically ignored in the formulation of world-historical concepts.

Agency in African History is addressed to historians of Africa and to a broader interdisciplinary audience interested in agency. This interdisciplinary audience includes scholars of African studies—cultural theorists, political scientists, anthropologists, and others—as well as historians of world regions beyond Africa. Individual contributions cover the seventeenth century to the present day and range in subject matter from histories of decolonization and international relations to the Atlantic slave trade, art history, urban studies, sports studies, and cultural theory.

Contributors

Mathew Ayodele
Felicitas Becker
Emily S. Burrill
Robin P. Chapdelaine
Kate Cowcher
Naminata Diabate
Walter Hawthorne
Lauren V. Jarvis
Rachel M. Petrocelli
Ian Read
Jodie Yuzhou Sun
Wallace Teska
Chepchirchir Tirop

Lauren V. Jarvis is an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her first book, A Prophet of the People: Isaiah Shembe and the Making of a South African Church, reflects her broader interests in understanding how people live with and through economic change.

Rachel M. Petrocelli is a professor of history at Santiago Canyon College. Her book Transactional Culture in Colonial Dakar, 1902–44 explores how ordinary city dwellers confronted colonial urban realities. Her current work centers on the dynamics of civil litigation in colonial Senegal.

Wallace Teska is an assistant professor of history at Florida State University and a junior research fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. His research on the legal and social history of francophone West Africa has appeared in Slavery & Abolition, French Historical Studies, and The Journal of African History.